Australians will soon need to verify their age to use search engines

12 July 2025

Ange Lavoipierre, writing for The Australian Broadcasting Corporation:

At the end of June, Australia quietly introduced rules forcing companies such as Google and Microsoft to check the ages of logged-in users, in an effort to limit children’s access to harmful content such as pornography. But experts have warned the move could compromise Australians’ privacy online and may not do much to protect young people.

We’re all for protecting children going online, but this initiative, as it stands, may be way too easy to circumvent. For instance, search engine users could remain logged out of their account, or make use of a VPN, to trick search engines into believing they are outside the country.

But I wouldn’t be surprised if ways to shutdown these options are eventually introduced. In the same way, say, Netflix can make using VPNs difficult. In addition, anyone accessing a search engine in Australia may be forced to actually login to their (age verified) account before they can do searches.

The search engine companies, after all, surely will not want to be in contravention of Australian laws. It seems at some point then, Australian search engine users will need to verify their age. Privacy advocates however are rightly concerned. Certain of the search engines already know enough about our activity online; do we want them knowing our personal details as well?

A sensible solution would be to use a digital identity service. These are independent of search engines, and any other tech companies, who might be required to confirm the age of their users.

One such service I use to both verify my identity, and I imagine age, when dealing with Australian government departments online, is Digital iD, which was developed by Australia Post. (Don’t you be saying the post office is incapable of innovation…)

MyID, created by the Australian Tax Office (ATO), serves a similar purpose.

Of course, we’re having to tell someone our age, and supply a verifying document — an Australian passport, or drivers licence — to do so, but at least the process is handled by an Australian government agency. Perhaps you don’t particularly trust those entities either, but I think they’re a far safer option than an offshore tech company.

In short, identity services such as MyID, or Digital iD, are saying the user is aged eighteen or over. They are not divulging actual ages, or dates of birth.

If the Australian government is so insistent we verify our age to access search engines, and who knows what other apps in the future, then the least they can do is allow us to use an Australian digital identity service to do so.

Triple J turns fifty, will rank Hottest 100 Australian songs to celebrate

12 July 2025

Happy birthday to the jays, which clocked the milestone back in January.

To mark the momentous occasion, a special all-time Hottest 100 countdown of Australian songs will be broadcast in a week, on Saturday 26 July 2025. This chart varies from the annual Hottest 100 countdowns, which rank the favourite songs of Triple J listeners, released each calender year, regardless of country of origin.

Voting closes on Thursday 17 July 2025, at 5PM AEST, so if you haven’t participated, time is running out. Now to the thorny question. What would I vote for? After giving the matter some thought, here’s what I came up with:

Alive by RÜFÜS DU SOL
Lie to Me by Vera Blue
Evening Star by All India Radio
Anthem for the Year 2000 by Silverchair
Rabbit Hole by Jess Day
Never Dance Alone by Crooked Colours
Let Me Down Easy by Gang of Youths
Under the Milky Way by The Church
Heart Attack by Flight Facilities
The Trouble with Us by Chet Faker and Marcus Marr
Beds are Burning by Midnight Oil

There are more I’d choose, but I think ten songs is the most you can vote for, as is I’ve listed eleven.

Limit AI use Colleen Hoover, Dennis Lehane, others, ask book publishers

10 July 2025

Colleen Hoover and Dennis Lehane are among American authors who have signed an open letter to book publishers including Penguin Random House, HarperCollins, and Hachette, asking them to extensively limit their use of AI. The authors are requesting no AI generated work be published, and publishing company staff are not replaced, either partly or wholly, by AI technologies.

The authors demands are reasonable, to a degree. Any AI created works of fiction will most certainly contain the literary DNA of previously published writers, given the quantity of novels that have been used to train AI models. I believe though reputable publishers would think twice about publishing books one-hundred percent generated by AI. But I’m not sure the authors’ expectations that the roles of employees be guaranteed is realistic, well intentioned as it is.

AI is here to stay. Attempting to create AI-free sanctuaries in workplaces is pointless. AI will impact on everyone’s work one way or another. What we need to do is adapt. The matter that really needs to be addressed, is the issue of writers’ works being used to train chatbots without permission or recompense. Maybe the letter will draw further attention to this problem.

The Top 100 bestselling books of 2025, as of July

10 July 2025

As complied by indie online book marketplace Bookshop.org. I’ve only read one title on the list, Careless People, by former Facebook Director of Public Policy, Sarah Wynn-Williams.

I used to read three to four books a month, but with the day work, and since ramping up what I do at disassociated a few years ago, book reading has taken a backseat.

But what can you do; there’s only so many hours in a day. I like the idea of publishing a list like this at the half year mark, all the year end editions can be overwhelming.

RELATED CONTENT

books, literature, reading

Tables, nested tables, tables to the centre of the Earth, website interface design before CSS

8 July 2025

United Kingdom based web frontend architect Den Odell:

HTML tables gave us something no other element did at the time: control. You could create rows and columns. You could define cell widths and heights. You could nest tables inside tables to carve up the page into zones. That control was intoxicating. It wasn’t elegant. It definitely wasn’t semantic. But it worked.

It worked, but you could spend hours, days even, building a table structure, then slicing up an interface mockup, so the often numerous components would fit together perfectly.

The process was tedious, to say the least. It required placing sometimes minuscule images, both GIFs and JPEGs — being two of the main web image compression formats of the time — side by side, depending on the best optimisation method for each part of the interface.

See here an image of a page constructed thusly from disassociated circa 2001, when this was more website, and less blog. It felt wrong working this way — both on personal and commercial projects — but in the early years of the twenty-first century browser support for CSS was woeful.

Eventually, reasonable support for CSS arrived, but then the next challenge emerged: encouraging tables-layout-accustomed web designers to work with CSS for layout instead of HTML. But that’s a story for another day.

RELATED CONTENT

design, history, technology, web design

You might not be told you are the victim of identity theft

8 July 2025

An Australian woman, identified only as Sarah, writing for the Australian Broadcasting Corporation:

No-one told me my identity had been stolen. No-one told me that my drivers licence and my passport, two of the most crucial personal documents, were compromised and had been for years. I only found out when I applied online for an eSIM.

This is something that has long concerned me.

If my identity were stolen, would I even know, or only find out when it was too late? A credit check is one tool available to Australians that could help ascertain if you have been a victim. Credit reporting companies in Australia are obliged to provide a free consumer credit report every three months.

Mine showed everything to be in order, and as expected.

If someone has been able to obtain some sort of line of credit in your name, without your knowledge or permission, a credit report will hopefully bring that to your attention. If you’re outside of Australia, you ought to look into anti identity theft tools available in your jurisdiction.

RELATED CONTENT

Australia, crime, current affairs, law

How Indragie Karunaratne developed a macOS app using Claude Code

8 July 2025

San Francisco based developer Indragie Karunaratne:

I recently shipped Context, a native macOS app for debugging MCP servers. The goal was to build a useful developer tool that feels at home on the platform, powered by Apple’s SwiftUI framework. I’ve been building software for the Mac since 2008, but this time was different: Context was almost 100% built by Claude Code.

Karunaratne has extensively documented the process. Of the twenty-thousand lines of code that make up the app, he estimates he wrote about one-thousand lines. Cluade Code did the rest.

RELATED CONTENT

artificial intelligence, technology

HR departments relying more on AI tools to screen job applicants

5 July 2025

Danielle Abril, writing for MSN:

Increasingly, job candidates are running into virtual recruiters for screenings. The conversational agents, built on large language models, help recruiting firms and hiring companies respond to every applicant, conduct interviews around-the-clock and find the best candidate in increasingly large talent pools. People who have experienced AI interviews have mixed reviews: surprisingly good or cold and confusing.

Pity the HR departments. It’s hard work having to draw up policies about procedures, and procedures about policies. All of that work leaves no time for their core function: recruiting staff, and managing human resources. By the way, I the find the use of the word resource a particularly odious HR practice. People are people, not resources. Instead of saying “we need to bring in a resource”, try saying “we need to hire a person for this role.”

Anyway, to reduce workloads, and ostensibly speed-up the recruiting process, some HR departments are using AI tools to screen “first-round” candidates for a role. I assume once a “second-round” list (or should that be pool?) of candidates is arrived at, an HR person becomes involved in the process.

No doubt there are large numbers of applicants for advertised roles, and some sort of screening is necessary to shortlist suitable candidates. To ease the burden though, HR staff could use AI tools to write up policies and procedures instead, so they can focus on the human side of the equation.

They could even take advantage of AI note taking apps, further reducing pressure on their time.

AI note takers standing in for online meeting attendees

5 July 2025

Lisa Bonos and Danielle Abril, writing for The Washington Post:

Clifton Sellers attended a Zoom meeting last month where robots outnumbered humans. He counted six people on the call including himself, Sellers recounted in an interview. The 10 others attending were note-taking apps powered by artificial intelligence that had joined to record, transcribe and summarize the meeting.

AI note takers attend online meetings so you don’t have to. They will record the entire meeting, and prepare a summary afterwards. Sounds convenient. Some people though have raised concerns about meeting participants not really participating in meetings, and there they might have a point.

Others are worried that note taking apps are recording the entire conversation. But if it’s a work meeting, and not a private conversation about, say, a highly sensitive matter, is that a major concern? Surely online meeting apps also record, and store, the entire contents of a meeting, even if all participants are fully present? There’s also the point such apps might spill the tea elsewhere.

It’s been a while since I was in a workplace-based situation, but I would’ve relished the opportunity to have an AI note taker stand in for me at meetings. That way I could — you know — do some actual work instead. This sounds like one to AI, I say.

Emulate Wes Anderson with Shoot Like Wes, a book by Adam Woodward and Liz Seabrook

3 July 2025

Jason Schwartzman, Bill Murray, on the set of Wes Anderson's film Asteroid City

Perhaps the world is still sufficiently pre-peak the work of American filmmaker Wes Anderson, to the point that photographers still want to emulate his style in their work. If you believe the former, and are among the latter, then Shoot Like Wes, a book by British journalist and film critic Adam Woodward, and London based photographer Liz Seabrook, might be for you.

Inspired by the distinctive vision of director Wes Anderson, Shoot Like Wes is packed with rich imagery and in-depth analysis of the auteur’s remarkable body of work. This is the only guide you’ll need to create your own cinematic masterpiece, transforming everyday scenes into vibrant, storytelling moments worthy of the big screen.

RELATED CONTENT

books, film, photography, Wes Anderson

1 2 … 194 NEXT